With VMWorld Europe coming up,it seems Citrix is trying to get VMWare out of its warm cozy mansion, it seems they plan to announce next week that they won’t charge anymore for XenServer.
Altough the underlying Xen technology is fully Open source , Citrix doesn’t plan on fully opensourcing XenServer itselve yet. So how will they make their money then you’d ask ? By shipping a new managment framwork that will support both XenServer and the Microschoft Hyper-V platform.
It looks like Citrix is also planning to announce a similar agreement with Micro
soft as RedHat already did earlier this week.
So what will VMWare do as a reaction next week ?
At last it looks like there will be a free, supported, commercial-grade virtualization solution for those of us who dont have the budget for VMware and have been disappointed with Hyper-V and its predecessors.
I can only imagine this is unhappy news for VMware who surely must now take a reality check on their pricing. I only hope they do not go the same way as Netscape, having 3 strong vendors in the market stops a lot of the kind of bad behavior you see from ERP, CRM, and BI vendors (you know who you are).
Citrix are advertising Free Xen on google (http://tinyurl.com/b3juwd) as of now, and apparently I can even get free deployment advice from these guys: (http://tinyurl.com/bflg76).
Anyone recommend a good free hardware supplier? 🙂
Whats next? Free electricity? If only solar was viable in the UK…
AG